Christopher Lee : What Colour are the Dead ?

The early reception of Henry Lawson's work saw both the work and the artist produced as the Nation on the basis of a narrative gaze which eschewed imaginative embellishments of its object. Lawson's objective, unemotional, and realistic treatment of typically Australian scenes in the 1890s were celebrated as a National art and then transposed into a National knowledge. This process was part of a direct contestation of Imperial authority as it was deployed through another set of knowledge which produced the country as a colony of the Empire. According to one reviewer, Lawson's art ‘throws a strong vivid flashlight upon Australian life, and the literary photographs ... which are thus presented to mind, must do much to correct false and create fresh impressions of Australian life among all who are amiably or earnestly interested in learning what our National Characteristics are and towards what they may be tending.’ Lawson's work then becomes the authorised document of the Nation through its production of a knowledge of the object of the Nation — a knowledge authorised by the objectively real gaze which fixes that object as the real, the authentic, and the true. This notion of a form of nationalism which authorises itself through the deployment of a positivist knowledge of the Nation which is in turn authorised by the real or fixed location of the Nation as object takes on interesting implications when we look at it in the context of Homi Bhaba's theorisation of fixity and the stereotype in colonialist discourse. In ‘The Other Question’ Bhaba explores the concept of fixity (integral to colonial discourse's ‘ideological construction of otherness’) through ‘its major discursive strategy’ the stereotype. The durable authority of this form of knowledge, he argues, lies in its paradoxical vacillation between ‘what is always in “place”', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated'. For as the ‘fixed’, or the known, the stereotype represents (or is represented as) the privileged object of a colonial discursive authority — an authority rarefied and invigorated (via the stereotype) through the just and reasonable reflection of itsown epistemological gaze. While as the ‘anxiously repeated’ the stereotype is encoded with the threat of duplicity — the deflection of the self-affirming gaze of colonial authority — a threat which functions as an invitation for a vigilant form of surveillance which continually fixes and reaffixes the colonized subject as the authorised and authorising object of imperialist knowledge.